Intelligent Design of a Pitch-rate Controller for a Single-Stage Launch Vehicle

The first stage is very crucial for a given launch vehicle. Hence, it is necessary to design a robust control system for its flight control. In this paper, firstly conventional control approaches such as PID and LQR are designed for the autopilot of a single-stage launch vehicle. Subsequently, performance of PID controller is enhanced using Neural Network based PID (NNPID) controller which uses combination of three neural networks to calculate optimal PID gains. The autopilot developed in this paper stabilizes the launch vehicle’s pitch angle, gradient of pitch, and drift angle. The drift of the launch vehicle is caused by many known and unknown reasons, therefore the controller is henceforth designed to drastically reduce the effect of such causes to minimum. Comparison of performances envisages that NNPID controller reduces the effect of drift significantly compared to PID and LQR.